People don’t decide the way classical economics assumes. They take mental shortcuts and follow seemingly irrational rules that were tuned for survival in the Paleolithic, not for pricing pages. This article distills the key behavioral economics findings into 50 design guidelines, plus two numbers worth memorizing: losses hurt about twice as much as gains please, and a nudge moves behavior by about 1.4 percentage points.

AI errors halve every 5 months on accounting tasks | Meta’s AI appliance, the Muse Charm | Synthetic users can revive participatory design and drive divergence in the exploratory design phase | Context changes what counts as usable, so test where the work happens | Synthetic users give too-nice feedback

Asking users to watch AI carefully is doomed to failure | Adaptive authoring of content that changes depending on the reader | A cluttered experience kills user focus | To predict patients’ treatment preferences, discussing medical dilemmas beat both survey responses and the patients’ own spouses | Measure outcomes, not vanity metrics | Spotlight the main features and keep specialized options backstage | Allow users to paste passwords | Ambient AI works in the background

Users judge your design against the version they imagined before first use. When the experience confirms expectations, they’re satisfied; when it falls short, the same product disappoints. And the bar never stops moving: every improvement you ship becomes the baseline users bring to the next release. Expectations also shape the work people attempt and the effort they devote to checking the result.

My 10 favorite UX slogans total a mere 40 words, yet they distill the most enduring lessons from my 43 years in usability. All the slogans also work for the coming era of superintelligent AI agents that run tasks for hours or days. What changes is where you aim them.

Vigilance fails in two ways, and UX must design against both. Watching: detection of rare signals drops 10–15% within 30 minutes of continuous monitoring. Answering: when the computer works alone and interrupts occasionally, scrutiny decays per decision rather than per minute. Human-in-the-loop fails on both loops unless you design short watches and rare, meaningful questions.

Most deskilling research studies the wrong condition | Speak the user’s language | Using AI increases people’s preference for AI | Interruptions cause stress | Experienced UXers give the most important findings the most attention | Keep paper prototyping for team building | Support scripts often leave users stranded | Allow users to resize screen areas

Current AI agents help blind users at least as well as screen readers in separate studies and may already do better | Decompose styles into elements you can choose and combine | Show users their options to spare them the burden of recall | AI-simulated users can help designers think through how people will use a design | Optimizing individual elements can undermine the whole user experience | Fail while design changes are still cheap | Before–after sliders

Defaults decide what most users experience and teach them what to consider normal, so leaving a setting unchanged tells you little about its quality. Choose defaults that minimize harm and preserve future choices; with AI, make consequential assumptions visible and define the agent’s authority before delegating.

Users say they don’t trust AI, but they tell it their secrets anyway | More people have gained jobs because of AI than have lost them | Every form field you cut increases conversion | The two main ways users direct AI: specify upfront or correct as you go | Keep users in the flow | How to use humor in AI | Combine insights from multiple research methods | The IKEA effect increases the perceived value of something you built yourself | Protect users’ focus by limiting distracti

Several approaches help AI learn how to serve individual users better | A survey reveals differences between companies profiting from AI and the rest | Real-time feedback during editing | Show how far a slow process has advanced toward completion | Delegation to AI agents deviates from traditional economic modeling | Show the context, sources, and rules behind AI answers | The price of “free” can overwhelm arithmetic | Be clear about the next step

Comparison tables ease the burden of remembering alternatives and help users understand which option fits their needs and what would change that verdict. This article explains the psychology of choice and delivers guidelines for designing comparison tables and for getting your products into the comparisons that AI agents now assemble.

100 top UXD methods ranked by breadth, altitude, persuasion, and cost. AI prototyping wins as the highest-value method. Cheap framing methods crowd the rest of the top 10, because deciding what to build outscores building it. Expensive workshop rituals sink, and 6 famous methods have a high risk of being design theater.

AI is good at coding open-ended survey answers | AI agents shop without Google Gullibility | Half of AI conversations include a breakdown, so the recovery experience deserves more attention | AI needs context to suit the task | Field reports from projects that implement AI agents | People develop feelings for their AI | Respect users’ time: every extra step carries a cost for them and for you | AI can make users feel they’re creating for an audience | The ends of names and la

Since January 2025, tech job postings have asked for 25% fewer skills but 5% more experience | AI spending among OpenAI’s heaviest research users is growing at 129% per month | 26% of young-adult chatbot users say they feel dependent on AI, but the addiction scales disagree | Undo = the user’s escape hatch | Suno 6 sounds worse than Suno 5 | Anthropic’s 3 scenarios for how AI will transform the economy forget the robots | Sometimes you should make users stop and think | Mini